Trust Development in Leadership Relationships – TDLR

To investigate how trust develops in the relationship between leaders and followers, several steps are necessary to clarify some ambiguities and fill in gaps of the literature. We therefore choose to use multiple research methods in order to clarify certain points in the literature (qualitative study), to build a model of original research tested by quantitative methods (experiments and field surveys).

The first way to test the model is to go back to the field and investigate qualitatively the extent to which this model can apply to the stories of a new sample of individuals belonging to different cultures and then to investigate cross-cultural issues regarding trust development, erosion an repair in cross-cultural contexts.

The second way is to explore the elements of the model in a quantitative survey, and lastly (simultaneously) investigate the elements of the model in a series of experiments.

The results will be exploited during the progression of the project and more specifically from 2014 (task 5 of the project)

The team has already made substantial progress toward identifying how trust is violated in the leader-follower relationship and has developed an inductive model from a first qualitative study conducted in 2011. The purpose of the project proposed in this application is then to test this model in a number of ways.

See: Grover, S., Hasel, M., Manville, C. & Serrano-Archimi, C. (2014). Follower reactions to leader trust violations: A grounded theory of violation types, likelihood of recovery, and recovery process. European Management Journal, 32:5, 689-702.

Others studies are on progress aiming at studying trust violations among dyads, trust development across time and the impact of culture on trust violation and its consequences on organizational behaviors

Studies in progress aim at studying:

Trust violations and its consequences in cross-cultural settings

Trust development /erosion across time among dyads «subordinate-direct manager)

Publications:
Grover, S. L., & Hasel, M. C. (2015). How leaders recover (or not) from publicized sex scandals. Journal of Business Ethics, 129, 177-194.

Grover, S., Hasel, M., Manville, C. & Serrano-Archimi, C. (2014). Follower reactions to leader trust violations: A grounded theory of violation types, likelihood of recovery, and recovery process. European Management Journal, 32:5, 689-702.
Finalist for the 2015 Syntec award (French national consulting association) for the best research paper published in management/HRM/organization disciplines)

Conferences:
Grover, S., Manville, C., Abid-Dupont, M.A. & Hasel, M. (2015). Trust recovery between leaders and followers: the importance of character attributions. 75th Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Quratulain, S., Khan, AK., Manville, C. & Serrano-Archimi, C. (2015). Impact of Intensity of Supervisor's Mistreatment on Employee Attitudes. 75th Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
• Annual Meeting Best Paper

Manville, C., Grover, S., Abid-Dupont, M-A., Serrano-Archimi, C. & Hasel, M. (2014). The roles of apologies and forgiveness in regaining lost trust between leaders and followers, 28th Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management Conference, Sydney, Australia.

Grover, S. L., & Hasel, M. (2013). Sex and power: How political leaders recover from sex scandals. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Academy of Management, Orlando.

Grover S., Hasel, M., Manville, C. & Serrano Archimi, C. (2012). Maintaining leader-follower relationships in the aftermath of trust violations, 72nd Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston, USA.

The “Trust development in leadership relationships” project examines how trust relationships between leaders and followers develop, deteriorate, and rebuild. It is an essential project because: organizations are based on leader-follower relationships; these relationships demand research investigation; trust is fundamental to the relationship; and we therefore need to understand how trust is developed, violated, and restored. Only relatively recently have organizational scholars begun to examine leadership from the point of view of the relationship in depth. Nevertheless, there are rich determinants to relationship quality that have not been examined and certainly not fully understood in the leadership literature. This proposal contributes to the leadership and trust literatures and builds on work already done by the research team by focussing specifically on the role of trust in the relationship between leaders and subordinates. A series of studies using multiple methods to examine how trust develops in leadership relationships comprise the project. The theoretical framework is based on trust and leadership theory and the research will explore how trust develops and specifically how people react to violations of trust.

The team has already made substantial progress toward identifying how trust is violated in the leader-follower relationship and has developed an inductive model from a qualitative study. That model has identified two central types of trust violation: dashed expectations and abuse of power. Dashed expectations offer a possibility of recovering the trust whereas trust violations based on an abuse of power offer little possibility of recovery. The present project uses qualitative, survey, and experimental research methods to test the model, and therefore requires a team of researchers versed in various methods and areas of specialization. The leader of this project is Caroline Manville (Assistant professor, University Toulouse 1-Capitole, France) who will be supported by Steven Grover (Professor, University of Otago, New Zealand), Markus Hasel (Assistant professor, EMLyon, France), Carolina Serrano-Archimi (Assistant professor, University Aix-Marseille, France), Karim Abdul Khan (Assistant professor, Suleman Dawood School of Business, Pakistan), Samina Quratulain (Assistant professor, Lahore University, Pakistan) and Marie-Aude Dupont (PhD student, University Aix-Marseille, France).